Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane

       Chapter 2

       Keeping the Lawn

       and still we smile and

       beg to mow your lawns

       beg to clean your toilets

       while you look past us

      — Mike Alfred, Poetic Licence¹

      The domestic lawn is directly attached to or surrounding the house, it is privately owned, kept (well or badly) by someone, and is totally, partly, or not at all visible to the public. It always ends somewhere, bounded by a wall, a pavement, a fence, a hedge, a herbaceous border, in some more or less conscious relationship with adjacent lawns, veld, roads, parks and the larger landscape. Does the domestic really end at the kitchen door? Is the lawn simply a ‘view’ through the bedroom window, a backdrop to the battles within? The lawn is sometimes considered the outside of the house but, as I argue in this chapter, it can also be seen as fundamentally part of and within the domestic sphere.

      In this chapter I aim to explain how the domestic lawn as a working landscape is implicated in issues of belonging, ownership, success and failure, gender and race. It describes the ‘garden boy’ via an analysis of various gardening texts, literary passages and historical records, and then locates the ‘boy’ in relation to the master/madam/gardener. It also analyses white post-apartheid literary, artistic and archival representations of lawn mowing. Last, orientated around David Goldblatt’s photograph Saturday Afternoon in Sunward Park. 1979, the chapter offers a critical reading of whiteness and respectability in relation to the lawn. The photographs informing this reading are related to geographical spaces – Boksburg, Orania, Epping Garden Village, Sasolburg and Zamdela.

       Domesticating

      Two ideas frame this chapter. The first is that lawn maintenance, keeping the lawn – the flurry of activity that includes mowing, fertilising, watering, composting, weeding and edging – is surely the most acute example of landscape as verb. Without effort, time, money, knowledge and equipment the lawn cannot grow. Work – paid or unpaid, fun or fearful, for leisure or labour – is the foundation of the lawn. It is also worth reflecting on the synecdochical quality of mowing, the way in which lawn mowing tends to end up standing for lawn keeping in general.² What activities does it eclipse, what silences does it produce? I return to this question at the end of the chapter by examining watering, an obviously necessary input that is not always possible all year round, to many gardeners’ frustration. Not to put too fine a point on it, the lawn is work.

      Secondly, I want to propose that the idea of the domestic, of domestication as a process, and of domesticity as both space and ‘social relation to power’ (McClintock 1995: 34) is central to understanding human relationships to the lawn. What the notion of the domestic does – as opposed to ‘civilising’, for instance (although until the 1960s the verb ‘domesticate’, as Anne McClintock points out [1995: 35], was also used to mean ‘to civilise’) – is to bring the biological, zoological and botanical into the landscape along with the processes of human interpellation. The beast, as Achille Mbembe argues in On the Postcolony (2001), has been the sign under which the native, under which Africa has been read. Frantz Fanon made this point too. As he argues in The Wretched of the Earth, colonial vocabulary constantly deployed ‘zoological terms’ for natives: ‘breeding swarms’, ‘spawn’ and ‘vegetative’ rhythms of life (1963: 41–42). Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff concur that ‘the idea of domesticity was saturated with natural imagery’, in the imperial centre as well as in the periphery (1992: 39). In fact, according to Kay Anderson, before the seventeenth century the term ‘savage’ was applied not only to primitive peoples, but to plants, too (1997: 474).

      For Mbembe, domestication is the process whereby the beast, close to being human, can (1) come ‘to where he or she can enjoy a fully human life’ (2001: 2) and (2) come to be known as familiar, that is to say, made familiar and understood to be familiar. According to Mbembe, domestication is not only a process of making humans (or at least approximating humanity) but is also a mode of knowing, empathising, giving an account of the beast. Provocatively, Mbembe’s definition insists on what he terms the ‘logic of conviviality’ (110): a mode of familiarity expressed and experienced as intimacy, affection, even love. In contrast to the conception of the native as property – a ‘thing of power … [that] … could be destroyed, as one may kill an animal’, cut up, cooked and, if need be, eaten – Mbembe posits an interpretation of coloniality that rests on the idea that ‘one could, as with an animal, sympathize with the colonized, even “love” him or her; thus, one was sad when he/she died because he/she belonged, up to a point, to the familiar world’. He writes: